I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist. But Twitter -- and Facebook, for that matter -- is desperately broken in ways that alienate users, spread hate and endanger us as a species.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

While robots have the potential to be very intelligent, if there's one thing that books, movies, and even our own experiences have shown, it's that they also can be remarkably dumb. So one sure-fire way for the U.S. to continue leading the robotics world is by investing in education. Not only are these machines getting smarter every day, but so too are other countries, training the kind of workers required to operate robots that can coat cars on assembly lines with paint and produce sneakers faster than ever. That's one takeaway from a new report released Monday by a group of 120 robotics experts. Intended to brief the U.S. government on the state of robotics so that the government can better plan for the future, the Roadmap to Robotics report is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (as well as a few universities) and written by experts from the private sector as well as academic institutions like like Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale.

At a time when India's software services industry is witnessing a slowdown, the State government is now betting big on startups. It is chasing technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and gaming that will influence consumer behaviour and organisations and also give rise to startups to disrupt the market. Though the IT services sector has been affected, other growth sectors such as startups are doing well and attracting good investments. Bengaluru continues to offer the best ecosystem for tech companies. There were concerns and they affected the industry temporarily. But the brand is back and Bengaluru continues to be a favoured investment destination.

Instead of talking about artificial intelligence (AI) many describe the current wave of AI innovation and acceleration with – admittedly somewhat differently positioned – terms and concepts such as cognitive computing or focus on several real-life applications of artificial intelligence that often start with words such as "smart", "intelligent", "predictive" and, indeed, "cognitive", depending on the exact application – and vendor. Despite the term issues, artificial intelligence is essential for and in, among others, information management, medicine/healthcare, data analysis, digital transformation, security (cybersecurity and others), various consumer applications, scientific advances, FinTech, predictive systems and so much more. The historical issue with artificial intelligence – is cognitive better? There are many reasons why several vendors doubt using the term artificial intelligence for AI solutions/innovations and often package them in another term (trust us, we've been there). Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that has somewhat of a negative connotation in general perception but also in the perception of technology leaders and firms.

Technologies including AI, bots, drones and robots will lead to the automation of large parts of the global workforce More than 861,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation, according to a study that comes as a further blow after hundreds of thousands of UK public sector jobs disappeared following the government's austerity cuts during and after the recession. However, it has to be said, that as more and more governments around the world experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, including Scotland who may even start trails next week, the news doesn't come as a complete surprise. The research conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, the business advisory firm, found that the 1.3m administrative jobs across the public sector had the highest chance of being automated. But, following on from the London Borough of Enfields move to replace some customer services clerks with a bot called "Amelia," even teachers, police officers and social workers could be replaced, at least in part, allowing the government to either free up more staff for frontline work or reduce the number of workers on the payroll. The research is included in Deloitte's State of the State report, which analyses the state of public finances and the challenges facing public services. Deloitte's previous work has shown that all sectors will be affected by automation in the next two decades, with 74% of jobs in transportation and storage, 59% in wholesale and retail trades and 56% in manufacturing having a high chance of being automated.

Way back in 1969, as a kid, I watched a very interesting movie - "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a science fiction where a super intelligent computer program HAL is in charge of a mission to Jupiter which also carries several astronauts. The program becomes rogue and tries to kill all the astronauts. The hero survives and manages to disable the program. There is a lot more to the plot, but the fight between human and computer is still vivid in my memory. In 1969, such a scenario looked possible. After all 32 years is a lot of time given the rate of our progress. We are now in 2016, and it appears that something similar may happen in the next 32 years. Even the experts have been predicting that Artificial Intelligence or AI will happen in next 20 years. The irony is that this prediction is being made for more than 60 years now!

A London NHS hospital trust has teamed up with tech giant Google to share patient data so it can save more lives. Doctors at the Royal Free say partnering with the artificial intelligence arm of Google - DeepMind - could free up over half a million hours per year, currently spent on paperwork, towards direct patient care. Medical staff will get'breaking news' style alerts about their patients. Privacy campaigners are concerned about data breaches. Information on more than 1.6 million patients a year will be shared with a subsidiary of Google.

Robots have become commonplace in many aspects of life including health care, military and security work. Yet until recently little thought has been given outside of academic circles to the ethics of robots. Silicon Valley Robotics recently launched a Good Robot Design Council -- which has launched "5 Laws of Robotics" guidelines for roboticists and academics -- on the ethical creation, marketing and use of robots in everyday life. Robots should comply with existing law, including privacy. Robots are products; they should be safe, reliable and not misrepresent their capabilities.

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.